How to Get Your Braze Email Strategy Holiday-Ready
- Allison Sanders
- Dec 2
- 4 min read
To keep your holiday emails out of the spam folder, now’s the time to fine-tune your Braze setup and audience strategy. The holiday season is the most competitive time of year for email marketers. For many brands, Q4 email performance directly impacts annual revenue, and inbox placement becomes the deciding factor between record-breaking results and missed goals.
This year, getting into the inbox is more challenging than ever. Gmail and Yahoo! have tightened deliverability requirements, lowered spam tolerance, and increased scrutiny on authentication. Mailbox providers are also aggressively deactivating inactive addresses and reducing storage limits, which means rising soft bounce rates across the industry.
Below are four key areas to focus on.
Prioritize Soft Bounce Management
Mailbox providers are saving money by clearing out abandoned accounts and shrinking mailbox storage. Soft bounces that once resolved themselves are now often permanent indicators of invalid addresses.
Continuing to send to these inboxes harms your sender reputation and increases the risk of junk folder placement during your most critical sends.
In Braze, start by excluding recent soft bounces from your targeting. To do this, create a segment that filters out users who have soft bounced in the last 30 days using the "Soft Bounced exactly 0 times in the last 30 days” criteria. For long-term protection, enable automatic suppression rules for repeated soft bounces so they stop entering your campaigns altogether.
Need help managing soft bounces long-term? Check out our guide to mastering soft bounce management.
Use a Real Reply-To Address to Build Trust
Reply behavior is a positive trust signal for mailbox providers, and a functioning reply address tells ISPs that your brand is credible and responsive. This signal matters, especially during peak sending periods.
Review your reply-to configuration in Settings > Workspace Settings > Email Preferences in Braze. If you see either of the following, it’s a sign to take action before holiday sends:
Your Braze sending subdomain (e.g., noreply@send.yourbrand.com) is set as the reply-to address.
No reply-to address configured at all.
Both are indicators that replies aren’t being monitored, which can hurt trust and engagement signals.
Replace these with a real, monitored inbox such as support@yourbrand.com, help@yourbrand.com, or a dedicated reply-processing address. If you use an automated reply routing system, ensure it’s correctly configured and monitored.
Test Your Authentication Setup Before It’s Too Late
Your domain may have been fully verified when you first onboarded to Braze, but things change. IT updates, security changes, DNS adjustments, or even the occasional “surprise maintenance window” from major cloud providers can unintentionally affect your authentication setup. A quick re-validation before the holidays ensures everything is still aligned and delivering as expected.
High-volume peak-season sending can amplify even small authentication gaps, especially around SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment. Before you scale your sends, run a spam and authentication test in Braze to confirm everything is still properly configured:
Navigate to Inbox Vision
Open the Spam Testing tab
Review authentication indicators and resolve any warnings
Fixing these issues now prevents costly reputation impacts later in the season.
Segment Strategically and Prioritize Engagement
The holiday inbox is crowded, and ISPs are paying close attention to how recipients interact with your emails. This is not the time for "spray and pray" campaigns – Strategic segmentation is essential.
Focus your holiday sends on users who have demonstrated recent engagement. In Braze, build segments based on meaningful engagement signals. Go beyond basic opens and clicks. Consider segmenting by:
App sessions or purchase activity in the last 30-60 days. These users are actively engaging with your brand, not just your emails.
Product browsing or cart activity. Shopping behavior indicates intent and relevance.
Customer lifecycle stage. New customers, repeat buyers, and VIP segments have different engagement patterns and tolerance for email frequency.
Test your segmentation approach. For example, A/B test a tightly engaged segment (e.g., purchased in last 30 days) against a broader one (e.g., any engagement in last 60 days) to find the right balance between reach and deliverability impact.
The goal isn't just volume. It's reaching people who will engage, which protects your sender reputation for the entire holiday season.
Remember: sending to unengaged users doesn't just waste your effort. It actively damages your ability to reach the people who want to hear from you. Quality matters more than quantity, especially when ISPs are closely monitoring engagement signals.
The Inbox Has Never Been More Competitive
Holiday email volume surges this season, and ISPs will be watching closely. A deliverability issue now can impact your performance for months to come.
The brands that win this season won't be those who send the most emails. They'll be the ones who combine smart audience strategy with flawless technical execution.
Don’t wait until your emails start landing in spam. Review your Braze setup now, fix any issues, and go into peak season with confidence. The difference between inbox and spam folder is the difference between hitting your goals and missing them entirely.
Need help getting it right? Our deliverability experts are here to guide you through the season. Contact us to get tailored support and make sure your messages land where they belong: in the inbox.